Repeal the Wild Horse Heritage Act 2018

I am writing to ask that you act to repeal the Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Act 2018 and advocate for the protection of Kosciuszko National Park from feral horses.

The Heritage Act prioritises a single destructive invasive species over many native species and ecosystems, some of which are found nowhere else in the world. It is incompatible with the principles that underpin Australia’s protected area system, and with our international commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Feral horses should have no place in a sensitive national park. Our natural and historical heritage will come under immense pressure from the catastrophic damage caused by horses in Kosciuszko.

Here are other reasons you should act to overturn the Kosciuszko Wild Horses Heritage Act.

- Feral horses are having a severe impact on the natural environment in Kosciuszko National Park. This has been demonstrated in multiple scientific studies. They are causing erosion of stream banks, trampling wetlands and bogs, spreading weeds, destroying the habitat of threatened species such as corroboree frogs, and depriving wallabies, kangaroos and wombats of food. Many of Kosciuszko’s species are threatened and not found anywhere else.

- The NSW Threatened Species Scientific Committee has concluded (in a preliminary determination) that habitat degradation and loss by feral horses is a key threatening process. They found that feral horses ‘impact a wide range of ecological communities across the Australian Alpine region of NSW, a declared UNESCO Biosphere Reserve’.

- The heritage value of feral horses in Kosciuszko National Park has been overstated. The horses there are just like any other feral horse with no distinguishing traits. Australia has more than 300,000 other feral horses, the largest wild horse population in the world. Just because horses have been in Kosciuszko 150 years does not give them heritage value. By that skewed logic, foxes, pigs, rabbits and other invasive animals would also have heritage value.

I ask that you work to repeal the Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Act 2018 and instead support the 2016 Kosciuszko National Park Draft Wild Horse Management Plan.

Please act to protect the irreplaceable natural values of Kosciuszko National Park, a park much cherished by NSW citizens.

Thank you for your time reading my letter and considering my position.